Three days after his dramatic win at Michigan International Speedway, the impact of Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s first win in four years is being felt from Michigan to Sonoma, Calif.

At Michigan, track president Roger Curtis said his ticket office saw a 22 percent increase in ticket sales for its August race over last year, when Denny Hamlin won the June event.

Ticket sales at Sonoma—the next stop on the Sprint Cup circuit—spiked 20 percent Monday over what the track did last year, track spokesman John Cardinale said. On the NASCAR.com Superstore, sales were up 500 percent from a year ago, according to JR Motorsports vice president of licensing Joe Mattes.

And the TV ratings for Sunday’s race on TNT were up 15 percent, the highest overnight increase for any race this year.

Those are just four examples of how Earnhardt’s victory in the Quicken Loans 400 could affect the sport. While there are other factors at play—the Michigan race had lots of intrigue with high speeds and new tires, and fans typically are not buying tickets as far in advance as they used to—the first win in four years by the sport’s nine-time most popular driver appears to have produced big benefits.

“It’s going to take (Michigan) about two weeks to figure that impact out,” said former Charlotte Motor Speedway president H.A. “Humpy” Wheeler. “The only time I could tell immediate things was when he won the All-Star race at Charlotte; it bumped ticket sales big-time for the 600 a week away, and it was close to (his hometown) of Kannapolis.

“But he’s got fans all over. It will be interesting to see. I’m sure it will be a positive thing. How long it will be is another story.”

Earnhardt certainly had his fans out in droves at Michigan, where his victory drew an incredible response from the estimated crowd of 82,000. It came on Father’s Day, and Earnhardt is the son of the late seven-time Cup champion Dale Earnhardt.

“We’ll see if that (ticket sales increase) sustains, if that keeps going,” Curtis said. “There’s a tremendous amount of excitement around this. … We had a perfect mix of speed and competition—and Junior, of course, winning on top of that is really going to help.”

There was no Earnhardt victory merchandise immediately available but it could be on the market by the end of the week—a process that is taking a bit longer because of the Batman “Dark Knight Rises” paint scheme on his car and getting approvals from Warner Bros.

The plan is to get that merchandise to the Cup race at Sonoma this weekend as well as at Road America in Elkhart Lake, Wis., for the Nationwide Series race this weekend, where Earnhardt’s three JR Motorsports teams will compete.

Products associated with the paint scheme and the victory—T-shirt orders were being taken online—made up 54.5 percent of total sales at the NASCAR.com Superstore on Monday, according to Mattes, and all Earnhardt products, which typically make up 25 percent of the online outlet’s total business, accounted for 78 percent on Monday. It also sold more than 2,000 diecast cars with the special Batman paint scheme.

“We’ll have a positive lift,” Mattes said. “You will see a good halo effect and deep sigh from everyone. … It piqued a lot of interest from vendors.

“It was a good day for the (Earnhardt) fan base and it’s going to be a good day for our vendor base and our retail partners. Mojo is everything and it carries momentum and ends the chapter. The only negative thing was, ‘when is he going to win,’ and that chapter is closed.”

On Earnhardt’s Facebook page, managed by JR Motorsports, a photo of Earnhardt from victory lane attracted 94,560 likes and 9,198 comments as of Wednesday morning.

And in mainstream media, sports pages and national television shows featured coverage of the event more prominently than they normally would on the Monday after golf’s U.S. Open and the NBA Finals.

That’s big in an area such as Florida, where Daytona International Speedway is on pace with last year for ticket sales of its Independence Day weekend race.

“It certainly enabled the sport to be on the front page and up front at a time when it probably would not have been because of the other large-scale sports,” said DIS vice president Sean Belgrade.

“It’s great to have the story put to the bed of ‘when is he going to win?’ That’s no longer a storyline anymore. For somebody with a fan base that large in victory lane brings additional momentum into July.”

Speedway Motorsports Inc. hopes the momentum continues. It has three of the next four races as the series goes to Sonoma this week, Kentucky Speedway next week and then New Hampshire after Daytona.

“What Michael Jordan was to basketball at his height, Dale Jr. is to NASCAR, and so many fans have been waiting for him to come back to victory lane,” SMI president Marcus Smith said. “A lot of fans who have been on the sideline waiting for their favorite driver to win is another effect that you really couldn’t have with any other driver.

“This has been a long time coming. It’s akin to the Red Sox winning The World Series.”

Wheeler said that if Earnhardt can go on a winning streak—he has won only twice in more than six years—it will have an even bigger impact.

“With all the holes in the dam, I think it’s one finger in one,” Wheeler said. “It’s not going to break the doors down of anybody’s ticket office, but it certainly is a positive step. … If he can get in some battles and win a couple of more races, that’s the kind of thing that will pick this thing up and give it some movement.”

Winning is different than just running well, said Wheeler, who is now a prominent consultant in the sport. If Earnhardt had finished second at Michigan, it would have gotten little notice and generated little impact.

“Nobody pays any attention to second place in sports,” Wheeler said. “We can finagle that and pat it on the head and wrap it up in pretty bows, but the fact is second place is second place. It’s when you win that creates the stir.”